Plan and Track User-Focused Deliverables, Not Activities
Johanna Rothman, known as the "Pragmatic Manager," offers frank advice for your challenging problems. She consults with leaders and teams to help them learn about practical and possible options. They can then decide how to adapt their product development. Her most recent book is "Project Lifecycles: How to Reduce Risks, Release Successful Products, and Increase Agility." See www.jrothman.com for all her books.
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Topics: Agile, CRM, Risk Management, Stakeholder Management
Many organizations—and projects—track activities, such as “requirements” or “design.” Those activities might well be useful. However, they are only interim team-based deliverables, not user-focused deliverables. When we track team-based deliverables, we are too likely to end up in a “watermelon” status, where things look good…until we realize they’re not.
Worse, many organizations want to capitalize the project effort as soon as possible. No one can capitalize activities—you can only capitalize finished work that customers can use.
No project has to fall into that trap of only tracking activities. Instead, project teams can track user-focused deliverables. While this is much easier with an incremental lifecycle or an agile approach, any project can track its progress toward user-focused deliverables. As a side effect, teams can see and reduce their cycle time, the time to deliver those deliverables.
Here’s how one project manager did that. First, she had to recognize the difference between an activity and a user-focused deliverable…
Recognize Activities vs. Deliverables
Tina’s organization was accustomed to seeing requirements and design documents. Many people across the organization liked to review those documents to see how the product would work.
However, Tina’s team …
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